Rachel Knoll’s Elevator Game Makes Social Avoidance a Skill Set

For all those people who feel inexplicably awkward towards making eye contact with strangers or coworkers who share the same confining space like in cramped elevator, you can now rejoice because there is a game requiring the specific set of skills that requires you to avert your gaze, making social avoiding a challenge. Rachel Knoll, student at the Royal College of Art in London, has designed a game called ‘Avoidance Training,’ which simulates the action of averting your gaze using eye tracking and head movement-detecting technology.

The game is extremely simple; your block-like character is assigned and while strangers enter the elevator, eye and head movement technology converts your real-time actions into actions on the computer screen. The objective of the game is that you have to avoid any eye contact with the strangers in the elevator for the rest of the ride. The game cleverly transforms the awkwardness of social avoidance into a skill.